Grammarly

So what's the big deal with Grammarly? It comes to you. There's no box to paste your text into.

Writing an email in Gmail? It's there. A message in Slack, a report in Word, a text on your phone? Also there. It underlines the slip, you click, it's fixed.

It reads tone as well as typos. Write "I already told you this on Monday" and the tone detector shows how that's likely to come across. Handy before you send something you'll regret.

Pay for Pro and it rewrites whole sentences and shifts the tone, say from blunt to friendly.

There's also Docs, its own editor in the browser, with AI helpers that look for citations, check for plagiarism and guess how readers will react.

And for teams, a shared style guide keeps everyone spelling the product name the same way.

It can be bossy. Reviewers talk about it flagging things that were right, changing "for" to "of" for no reason, and showing the same suggestion again after they'd dismissed it.

The bigger worry is newer. Long-time users on Hacker News say it used to fix grammar and now wants to rewrite whole paragraphs. Accept everything and you start to sound like everyone else who accepted everything.

The free plan nags, going by the reviews. One person took out a comma because Grammarly said to, then saw it flagged again as a paid-only fix.

The clever stuff is mostly for English. Advanced suggestions cover six languages. The rest get spelling and basic grammar.

And Docs has gaps. It's English only for now, it doesn't work on a phone, and two people can't edit together yet.

Start on Free. Spelling, grammar and tone detection cost nothing, for as long as you like. You get 100 AI prompts a month too.

Pro is $12 a member a month if you pay for the year. Pay monthly and it's $30. That's a big gap, so we'd only go monthly for a one-off, like a thesis or a job hunt.

What does Pro add? Full-sentence rewrites, tone changes, plagiarism and AI checks, and 2,000 AI prompts a month. Teams get style guides and brand tones, for up to 149 people.

Not sure? There's a 7-day free trial of Pro if you're eligible. Nothing is due when you sign up, and Grammarly emails you 2 days before it ends.

More than 149 of you? That's Enterprise, with no public price, sold through Superhuman Go. Yes, Grammarly's maker goes by Superhuman now.

One thing to watch: Grammarly sells different plans in some countries, so what you see on its site may not match this.

Grammarly has 4.7 on the App Store from about 225,000 ratings.

The happiest reviews come from people who never felt good at writing. One runs several businesses and still remembers school essays coming back covered in red pencil. For them it's about confidence.

People who dictate, or who write in a second language, say much the same on Hacker News. One calls it as essential as a spell checker.

Then there's the other camp. Writers who've had it for years say it has got too keen to rewrite them, and some have dropped it.

One more. A Hacker News thread in September, with nearly 400 points, was a warning that cancelling a team plan sets off messages to everyone on it. We only have the poster's word for that, but it's worth knowing if you're buying for a team.